Word: conchita
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...Maria Conchita Alonso puts an accent on ambition. Born in Cuba, raised in Venezuela, Alonso built a successful singing and acting career in Latin America. But "I didn't want only South and Central America," she says. "I want the whole world." With North America for a start. Her first major U.S. film role was as Robin Williams' Italian girlfriend in 1984's Moscow on the Hudson, for which she took lessons to speak with an Italian accent. Since then, she has made four more movies, including the current Touch and Go and Extreme Prejudice, a Christmas release in which...
...blow up cars in his tranquil Seville neighborhood. A waiter at his favorite restaurant serves him a martini containing a huge fly. His butler, ordinarily a paragon of civility, starts to give him Up. Somehow Mathieu remains untouched by all these shenanigans, but then he falls in love with Conchita, a ravishing young virgin. Though Conchita professes to adore Mathieu with an ardor equal to his own, she will not go to bed with him-and will not say why. Such torture is more than even Mathieu can take: slowly he surrenders to the chaos that presses...
...this great surrealist director, it is art of the most subversive kind. Buñuel wants the audience to see the world as he ultimately forces Mathieu to see it-as an irrational state where logic is a worthless tool. In Obscure Object the director never bothers to explain Conchita's stubborn celibacy or any of his story's other absurdities, for he does not believe that any explanations exist. In Buñuel's view, life's visible events are random and misleading; the sooner we learn to accept the meaninglessness of reality, the sooner...
This is why, in Obscure Object, Buñuel pulls the fiendish stunt of casting two actresses as Conchita, and then proceeds to interchange them at whim. It is his way of saying that the movie's subject is Mathieu's obsessive desire rather than the 'obscure object" that brings it about. There are many other rude jokes as well, all designed to pull the rug out from under civilization as we know it. Buñuel casts a dwarf as a professor of psychology and dreams up a clerical terrorist group called the Revolutionary Army...
...quite as good as Discreet Charm (1972) and Tristana (1969), the two Buñuel masterpieces it most resembles, the problem is one of tone. The new film opens on a note of antic humor only to turn, in the second half, unrelievedly grave: as Mathieu and Conchita's relationship lapses into sadomasochistic games, Buñuel's irony gives way to a surprising display of personal despair. The sudden shift in mood does not work, but it is forgivable. Having given his life to one of the century's great artistic revolutions, Luis...